GrubHub Delivers Android Beta, New iPhone App

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GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, released a new iPhone app and an Android app in beta last week. The company also revised its native Web app to take advantage of HTML 5 features like geolocation and client-side storage.

The new apps feature a GPS-enabled restaurant search. Users can find the restaurants that deliver near their current location, or choose to manually enter a delivery address from their smart phones. The app will display restaurants in the GrubHub directory that deliver to that location.

The GrubHub geolocation features should make it easy for travelers to order take out when they’re camping at a client’s office and don’t know what’s nearby, or if they’re too tired to leave the hotel but don’t want room service.

The GrubHub iPhone app is free to download from the iTunes app store. The beta Android app is also free, and can be downloaded by visiting the Android marketplace and searching for “grubhub.”

GrubHub, a Chicago-based venture backed company, gives its users access to food delivery service from more than 4,000 restaurants in U.S. cities including: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Boulder.

Like the original GrubHub site, the company’s mobile apps allow users to order food for delivery without having to deal with phone calls, busy lines or inept order-takers from their smart phones. If they prefer a little human talk time, however, the new apps let users tap to call a restaurant without having to dial and multi-task first.

GrubHub-listed restaurants deliver everything from pizzas, American Chinese and comfort food, to higher end fare and local specialties. Mike Evans, GrubHub co-founder and COO said in a press statement “These new mobile apps make ordering food from anywhere that much easier… Mobile orders comprised 1 percent of our total revenue [in 2009]. With the growing popularity of our mobile apps, we project mobile orders will comprise 10 percent of GrubHub sales by the end of 2010.” That represents about $7 million spent on food-to-go, the company estimates.

The new apps also let users read menus, reviews, and ratings before placing an order; search by specific items, restaurants, or cuisines from the home screen. The iPhone app lets them: save multiple addresses, past orders and credit card info so they can order regularly from a home, office or local watering hole without re-entering all their info again.

GrubHub’s Android app, currently in public beta, doesn’t have all of the same data-saving capabilities of the native Web app or the GrubHub iPhone app, yet.

Matt Maloney, the chief executive of GrubHub told TechCrunch: “In our first seven days out there, we didn’t even announce the app and our mobile orders increased by 50%.” He also added “Users wanted this because mobile is becoming the preferred platform for interacting with your local businesses. I pretty much only order from my phone now myself.”